[E20] Scaling The Unscalable, with Koby Hastings from LeadRilla

[00:00:00] Jason: Hey, what’s going on. Everybody. Jason here with another special guest episode of the scalable call center sales podcast. I am excited as always for my guests today. Koby Hastings from lead rilla. So lead really well. Let’s talk about that first then we’ll talk about Koby.

[00:00:16] So lead rilla is a customer acquisition and management platform initially built for individual sales agents, mostly in the insurance agency, uh, in 2018. They realized that individual sales agents aren’t getting enough access to performance marketing industry, like the large agencies and carriers had.

[00:00:36] So Koby partner’s team basically looked at that and now they deliver access to a pipeline of leads. Pipeline of calls all these things that they have going on to bring access to performance marketing to individuals. And now obviously working with agencies, the part with Koby that’s really awesome is that I had the amazing pleasure of spending a bunch of time with him.

[00:00:59] First. It started in March when we met and had a fun walk, a walk and talk at a lead gen world in Orlando. And then we spent the four city tour with leads council. Con, uh, for the industry impact events in June of this year. And thanks to Rob Seaver, putting that together and making it such a great event, bringing people like us together.

[00:01:22] We got to spend a lot of time and I was like, COBIT you need to come on the show, especially after seeing what he was talking about from stage during his part of the presentation. Talking about the insurance business agents leads the challenges and really what we’re going to talk about a bunch is scaling the unscalable, which can be a challenge.

[00:01:41] And I wanted them to come on the show and share all that with that intro COBie. Welcome to the scalable call center sales podcast.

[00:01:48] Koby: Thank you, Jason. Thanks for having me excited to be on. That was a good intro for lead Rilla who may need to hire you to do that for, um, partner calls and stuff. Uh, the wall.

[00:01:58] Yeah, for a fixed hourly rate. So that walk at Legion world in Orlando from, I don’t know, some steakhouse seafood. I was so full. I have two kids now. I don’t do much cardio. Jason’s probably much more fit than I am. He’s like, yeah, let’s just walk over to top golf instead of getting an Uber. And I thought it was like 200 yards.

[00:02:17] It was like two miles. I’ll never forget that walk though. We had some good conversations. Uh, so that was good. And I’m glad you threw that. Yeah. If

[00:02:25] Jason: you ever want to get to know somebody just throw in a random walk instead of driving somewhere. And, uh, you’ll, you’ll learn a lot about people and see how they do with dodging traffic.

[00:02:34] Sometimes if there’s not a sidewalk. So it was definitely fun. I love it. I thought it was a great, you know, instead of sitting down and meeting, got to know a lot about each other. And like I said, where I really see the value for the audience here is if they know who lead rilla is, and they know who you are or not, you started as providing leads in solving a problem.

[00:02:52] We’re independent. Licensed insurance agent. Don’t have access to leads, right? They could try to buy some leads, but they don’t have good leads. Performance-based marketing. And then you were solving that. And then the story which I won’t get into, but it started with your brother who is an insurance and just didn’t have access and was doing all kinds of marketing and really high CPAs.

[00:03:11] And so you’re solving them, but now you’re getting into calls. Now you’ve done lots of things where you built a platform where if we look at the people listening to this who are running call centers, uh, owners or business leaders and call centers. Telephone sales inside sales could be five. People could be a thousand people where there’s the things that you’re doing now for this spread out group of people.

[00:03:34] And I know that one of the terms that you have where it’s now that you get into the calls, especially is this distributed call center model that you have essentially with all these agents in the field. So talk about that and kind of, not just what you’ve built, but like the best practices you’ve learned when trying to feed.

[00:03:53] Essentially a whole bunch of random salespeople who are in the network.

[00:03:58] Koby: Yeah. So it’s definitely been a challenge. You know, not many people in our industry service, the independent agents. Um, I remember when we started out in 2018 or early 2019, we would go to conference. And we’re like forward 20 year old guys from Kentucky walking through this conference and just like walking up to the boots and talking to people.

[00:04:17] They’re like, what do you guys do? Like, yeah, we’re lead reload. We have a platform for independent agents and they’re like, you’re crazy. And still to this day, I probably agree with them. Um, but at that time, what we realized is independent agents have no access to the performance marketing industry, Legion industry as a whole, um, because no one’s ever serviced them, but no one really wants to.

[00:04:39] Put in the, the overhead and human costs that takes to service an independent agent that may have a budget of $500 a month. So we saw that as a huge opportunity. Um, and with our background and engineering, we just went, we went all in at it and we built a software that automated every process from allowing an agent to turn on a campaign, setting their own configurations.

[00:05:01] What types of leads or calls they want, um, how many they want per week. On a map like geographically, where they want those leads to come in and have give the agent full control over their lead buying experience. And so that’s something that huge carriers and agencies have, but agents just historically have never had access to that.

[00:05:19] So that was our initial idea. It grew really quickly, it took a lot of work and a lot of pain to get it done. Um, and we’re still, you know, optimizing and making it better to this day. Um, but today we have about 14,000 agents on our platform across life insurance. Uh, we do a little bit in the residential solar space, life insurance, Medicare, our bread and butter.

[00:05:41] And so earlier this year we launched calls. So our first two years were all data leads. Um, agents get set up campaigns for data. And then we had so much demand for warm transfers for these independent agents. And so we went about it in a way that no one has really ever tried with independent agents. And it’s definitely been a challenge and we’re still getting better at it to this day, but you can think of it as a distributed call center where, you know, we have a couple of thousand agents throughout the us that, you know, in their locale or wherever they are.

[00:06:13] So they’re in Boise, Idaho. They can log onto lead rilla, start a warm transfer campaign and tell us how many they want per day. And then we have the systems in the backend that can automate that with our partner call centers to route calls directly to agents. So you can think of it as these independent agents that are scattered throughout the U S they have campaigns live on our platform and then lead rilla as a whole becomes a large buyer in the industry, going out to pubs and sourcing calls from trusted partners to deliver to these ages.

[00:06:43] Jason: Got it. So let’s talk about the buyer’s side. So I’m not, I don’t want to talk about the sales side yet. The act of selling and the, either the independent agent, the agency, or let’s say, you know, the call center, the lead buyer side of it. I always know there’s challenges with that. And I know that in talking to you that there’s some big challenges that come up relative to the buying and the act of buying the leads.

[00:07:09] And I know a couple of things usually fall into budget. And then also into just a previous bad experiences with either buying leads or trying to buy leads or running ads, what are you seeing with that? Like the barriers that people can. With, when you’re chatting with them or they find out about you and then what have you found works well to help overcome whatever may have happened in the past or whatever their limitations might be on the buying

[00:07:34] side.

[00:07:35] Koby: Yeah. So one of the phrases you just said is previous bad experiences. So everybody’s had those and as a lead buyer, whether you’re a small agent, you’re a large agency or a larger carrier, the term previous. Yeah. I don’t think that exists in the sense, because you’re always going to have bad experiences.

[00:07:52] If you’re, if you’re a lead buyer, you’re all to have to test new publishers, new ad sources, like you have to test things. So I think for us, when we got into this, we were very skeptical when we brought in a, a publisher that we were buying leads from. But the more we learned about the industry is there’s a lot of bad stuff out.

[00:08:13] And I’ll be the first one to call it out publicly on podcast or wherever it is. Uh, like there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of trash out there. So you have to be careful and be diligent and your compliance when you onboard a new publisher, but you don’t have to know, like, you can’t have fear of, you know, you’re putting a $10,000 a month of budget to test a new lead source that it’s going to fall on its face because it very well may fall on its face.

[00:08:36] Um, that stuff’s out there. So for us, we are very strict on compliance, bringing on a new publisher, but we’re not afraid to test new lead sources every single day, because with testing, that’s how you figure out what works well. And that’s where you start scaling. So for me, I think testing is the biggest key to that as a lead, right.

[00:08:56] Jason: Where have you found the line? If there is one when you’re testing and the campaign isn’t working in the beginning and where it’s the actual lead source or the leads themselves, or maybe it’s the filters and parameters, um, and tweaked or changed. And then, you know, I don’t really want to dive into it fully, but then where is the responsibility like on the salesperson?

[00:09:19] Like how do you know where it’s failing and what could be tweaked to make it win in the

[00:09:24] Koby: test? Right. So for us, we completely rely on agent feedback. So our customers that we’re delivering leads to through their campaign, most of these are independent agents, our support team. They reached out to our support team all the time.

[00:09:39] So what we do internally is track complaints on. Any lead that comes in, we can, we have systems in place to detect if there’s trends for a certain lead source. We’ll we’ll know exactly that we’ll know the problem. Like if we’re getting a complaint, like an agent says, Hey, this consumer, I called, they said, They had to, uh, there’s so many things like they had to click through this form to get their free Walmart gift card.

[00:10:07] That’s an immediate red flag. Everybody industry knows that. So we’re very strict on our lead sources, cutting people off really fast. If we get, you know, three complaints in a day or two from agents, and those leads came from the same source that source is out, we’re done, you know, if they really make a lot of changes and want us to try something again, We’re very careful about that, but we’re as a lead buyer for us, we’re representing thousands of independent agents across the country.

[00:10:36] And those agents put trust in lead rilla as a platform to deliver a good quality. So for us as lead bar, we’re very strict. If we get a trend of complaints from a certain publisher, they’re cut off pretty fast.

[00:10:50] Jason: So I guess let’s dive into the other side because I know as a lead buyer, And call buyer in organizations to feed an internal sales team, right.

[00:11:00] An internal call center. Um, there’s I wouldn’t say there’s always reps that complain, but the rats will generally complain if they’re not capable of, or not closing those deals that it’s done. Right. So considering you have thousands of independent agents, they’re not employees, you can’t just walk over and have a conversation with them, right?

[00:11:21] They don’t work. They’re not afraid of you. They’re not worried about their job, like the completely end dependent. And so how do you know which feedback to take from who? Because the feedback from a really good salesperson and the feedback from a failing salesperson generally should be taken

[00:11:41] Koby: differently.

[00:11:42] Yeah. So I think there’s really a couple sides of this. One is our policy. We have very strict policies in our terms of conditions and agents. Like they kind of know our policies at this point, if they’ve been on the system for awhile. Um, so we do have to be strict in those. Um, sometimes for new users due to the platform, they may be a new agent in the industry.

[00:12:03] We’re pretty lenient. We’ll give them credit on certain people outside of those policies. And so that’s more of the stricter side on. Art internally just for us, um, to keep us above water. Uh, the other side of that is, and the approach we take is, you know, even though these agents, like you said, they’re not employed by us.

[00:12:22] They, they’re not scared of us. They’re not afraid of their losing their job. If they call up and cuss us out, like they’re not afraid of that. Our approach since the beginning is that these agents, they are our employees because these agents are they’re our business. If we don’t have these agents, we don’t, we don’t have a business.

[00:12:37] We’re probably not on this podcast. So we think of it in that way that these agents are putting trucks and lead rilla to be their lead source, because there’s not a platform out there that they can go to that gives them the control and flexibility that our system does. So we have to have their trust if we want to be successful.

[00:12:56] So we are always on the agent side. 98% of the time, if less, we can tell an agent and just being the various, like trying to get free leads from us, um, which happens every now and then, but that’s kind of our approach. Like agents. They’re not technically our employees, but we consider them a part of our organization because that’s the lifeblood of our business is the agent.

[00:13:17] Jason: So treating them like employees is great. And again, I’m thinking of call center owners, listening to this who have actual employees that they’re feeding leads to. And then who do you take of that from? Um, how do you also either coach train, manage track? Things like speed to lead, like how quickly people are making these phone calls, right on the, on the leads that they’re getting, not the calls.

[00:13:42] And then also making sure they’re actually doing consistent outreach and follow up instead of like, oh, I left one voicemail, your leads. Right.

[00:13:51] Koby: Yeah. So these are items that are in our product roadmap and things that are currently building being built. Now I may drop a few nuggets here that I haven’t said to many people.

[00:14:01] Um, but about a year ago we started tracking speed to lead. So when an agent, every time a lead agent gets a lead, they get a notification that they just received the new lead, whatever. And they can click the link there. They can log into the platform, view it in their CRM or system as a CRM too. So we track all of those events.

[00:14:22] And so we have timestamps on everything when a lead was generated when an agent viewed it for the first time. So we have data points on how quickly an agent is viewing the lead, and that’s not even reaching out. This is just viewing a lead. We’ve seen that some agents. We’ll wait over a day to even view the lead info.

[00:14:40] So we know they’re not contacting them and we’ve, we can leverage that data. Like say we have a large agency that comes on and does a white label model of our platform. They may have, you know, a hundred, 200 agents. We can give them direct feedback. Like, Hey bill, over here in Wisconsin, he just took it on average.

[00:14:58] He’s taking a day and two hours to even view his. His sell rate is zero, but here’s this guy over here. Uh, Jim, he’s getting to his leads on an average of seven minutes and he’s got a 9.3% sale rate. It’s like, we can leverage that data to feed back. Um, there’s things we’re doing to track when they actually.

[00:15:21] Make an outreach attempt to the consumer. There’s also, uh, like things with leaderboards, like in, like with say there’s a team like we’re building teams to where an agency could onboard all of their agents, whether they have three agents. 5,000 agents that can build internal leaderboard, leaderboards that leverages the performance data for each individual agent and how many leads they’re buying, where they’re buying.

[00:15:46] And they can have internal leaderboards where they provide rewards. And like the agency manager can run that. So, yeah. I think

[00:15:53] Jason: that’s fascinating when we’re talking about that speed to lead, like how long it’s taken for someone to open it. Look at it again. You’re not talking about calling, but you obviously can correlate how quickly, like, if they’re even just open.

[00:16:06] Yeah. Then, hopefully they’re calling soon and just looking at performance. And I think that’s some amazing metrics, especially when looking at it from a management perspective of any kind of performance lead system, which is then what feedback are you taking? And from who? Right. If Bob is taking a day plus to even open the email, and then Bob is complaining about how the leads sock, right then are you still, are you really gonna listen to.

[00:16:34] Right, right. Versus Kim who eight seconds after she gets the email, she’s opening it up. Pretty sure. She’s probably calling you right away. She says the leads aren’t good. Or they’re not qualified. Then, you know, you might take that opinion differently.

[00:16:49] Koby: Exactly. Yup. And we leverage that our support team does.

[00:16:52] So we, if somebody complains about a lead, we can go right to it. See how long it took them to view the lead. If it took them three days where like, This is probably was a good lead three days ago.

[00:17:03] Jason: Yeah. Well, and that’s one of the things I remember. I don’t even think we were talking. I think I heard you.

[00:17:08] And one of the cities during the industry impact events where you were talking about, you know, some agents who were just like wanting refunds are complaining, and then just the stats that you had about how long it was taking them and their average time to even just even open up. And click on the links.

[00:17:25] It’s just like that’s and that’s the kind of data that any sales team should have and leadership should have. And most don’t, which is what does that timeframe? What are we talking about? And then how does that relate to whose opinion you

[00:17:37] Koby: should take? Right? Yup. And a lot of that comes down, you know, we could take the approach where.

[00:17:44] We just get that support ticket as person takes. They’re just not a good agent. We could be like, oh, this agent is terrible. They’re never going to be a good customer, but for us, what we’re building out is training and content to set expectations for these agents, um, and teach them how to work a top of funnel digital lead.

[00:18:04] Um, I think a lot of agents as, as we’ve been in this business and started to scale and just seeing more and more, a lot of agents that don’t have good training. Um, or they may have training and they don’t watch it. So if we can provide that training and content and teach them how to work leads or how to take warm transfer calls and give her those to sales, they’re going to be much more successful.

[00:18:27] And they’re probably going to trust us because they’re spending their money with us. Um, and then that kind of translates to, you know, a call center, a large agency that is using our platform. Having that training, they can come in and just use the platform, the trainings all there for their agents. And there’s no overhead for them.

[00:18:44] Hey,

[00:18:45] Jason: and here we’ll be right back to the podcast in a moment, but first, are you ready to help your inside sales team close more deals? In my experience, there’s a certain percentage of your team that acts more like order takers than sales professionals. The first step to creating a scalable sales team is to equip your reps with the right mind.

[00:19:01] And proven strategies to transform them into quota breakers, to build a team of authentic persuaders that will crush their goals. Email [email protected] or go to www.cutterconsultinggroup.com. What are you seeing as either training or let’s just say best practices that. Companies need to be aware of when buying leads and then giving it to their sales team where what you’re seeing is different lead sources.

[00:19:31] Right. Because I know that when you started out, you’re doing Facebook now to just, you know, uh, diversify, I’m guessing you’re getting leads from other, like you said, the, you know, your approved partners that you’re working with, the publishers, how do you address that with the individuals or the agencies where the way they handle lead acts from this story?

[00:19:52] It’s different or is it similar enough where that’s not an issue through your platform?

[00:19:58] Koby: A lot of times it’s, it’s similar enough at the end of the day, a lead is a lead. Um, and I think the biggest misconception that agents have is a lead as a sale. This is not the case. It never will be the case. If it was a sale, the lead never would have gotten to you because the consumer would have bought something online.

[00:20:18] And the process of filling out the form and that’d be done. It’s a part of the buying process. It’s a long buying process for any product. I mean, life insurance, Medicare, any industry, uh, there’s a buying process involved. And an agent is the step in agents just don’t understand that leads don’t close at a hundred percent.

[00:20:37] Um, so a lot of that is just setting expectation, uh, for agents when they’re spending money on leads. Um, yeah. That makes

[00:20:46] Jason: sense. Well, and it’s good that with what you’re talking about and providing that the leads are from a similar source. I know that one of the biggest challenges that I’ve seen is when a sales team or sales person is being given leads from like Facebook, a web form, and then direct mail or a live transfer, and the way that you handle those, the conversations that you have, the pace that you need to go.

[00:21:11] Completely different, whether it’s India, outbound, you know what that looks like. Um, so it’s good to know that you’ve kept it simple where it’s like, here’s this, you just do basically the same thing and whatever the source was that created this, it’s the similar type mindset of that, you know, that lead.

[00:21:28] And I love what you said, a lead is not a sale. I see that. And I can totally visualize it in those terms, which people think, oh, well I got 10 leads. Like, why didn’t I close 10 sales? Like you’re you’re it must be the least. No,

[00:21:41] Koby: it’s always the leads

[00:21:43] Jason: always, always the leads in that framework versus like here’s 10 leads.

[00:21:46] You should close one or two. Okay. Now that right. Expectation is set. Now they understand that what they’re being fed or what they’re buying is different. Then there’s this other part, which I know this is important call center owners, but you’re dealing with this as well. And then optimizing, and this goes back into, you know, who do you listen to as well, but making sure you have the data, which is dispositions, right?

[00:22:09] Because one of the things that happens when lead buying, running campaigns, feeding a sales team is the sales team has giving this positions what happened, left message. Didn’t qualify, didn’t have money, like, you know, whatever it might. Then they put that in the system. Hopefully a lot of times they don’t, it’s not maybe an accurate or not.

[00:22:28] And then buying decisions are made based on that. How do you again, handle that? Where you may think of your 14,000 agents as your employees, they may or may not be at the high level of attention of detail that you and your data wizards want, uh, when making those decisions, um, how do you manage that? How, what do you have in place for that?

[00:22:47] And then what do you do with that information?

[00:22:50] Koby: Yeah. So, I mean, this goes back to earlier, we said, you know, the agent does it. They’re not afraid to lose their job. They don’t care about how they talk to us. Like, there’s just no care in that. So when you think about disposition, um, it’s tough to collect this position from independent agents.

[00:23:06] So what we’ve done is we’ve built a, we have this lead platform where they can come in and set up campaigns to buy leads or calls, but on the back end of that, we’ve built a custom CRM for them to use. So when they buy a lead, it goes directly into the CRM. And we allow them to record notes, change status, use it like a typical CRM, um, is over the past since we started, we see about a 40% disposition, uh, rate.

[00:23:31] So, you know, if an agent gets a a hundred leads, we’ll have 40 leads, we’ll have disposition on it. Whether there’s a point at book, there was a no answer, disconnected phone, et cetera. Um, so we’re, we’re working on ways to improve that. Um, first we use that data to optimize our. Media buying internally and also our lead buying from partners.

[00:23:53] Um, and we, we look at that every single day and we have metrics and reporting that shows us what’s performing best. What’s struggling. Um, if something’s performing well for two weeks and then it’s not for a week, we have reports to, to leverage that data and tell us. We’re trying to increase that disposition, right?

[00:24:09] Ideally we’d have a hundred percent. Um, but it is tough to incentivize agents. We’ve had ideas where we give them, you know, you get 10 cents of lead credit for every lead you record disposition on problem with that is agents would abuse it. They would, they have a hundred percent sell rate cause they would just mark them all as a sale or whatever it is.

[00:24:29] So what we’re building is automations where, um, this kind of solves, it kind of kills two birds with one stone. Um, so a lot of agents are bad at outreach. Like we talked about speed to lead. Um, they’re just, they’re slow to get to it. I think they can call them later in the week, uh, for the first outreach and it just doesn’t work.

[00:24:47] So what we’re doing is automating. So we’re releasing in about two months, a AI SMS bot that can hold a conversation with the consumer within a few minutes of them filling out the form on behalf of the agent. And so we put ourselves in the middle of that agent, consumer relationship to do the job for the agent.

[00:25:09] That one helps us let the agent. Perform better. They’re going to have a higher appointment rate, which is going to lead to a higher sale rate. It’s also going to help retention for us just with our agents, because they’re more successful with our leads and calls. And then lastly, it gives us more disposition data because we’re in control of that conversation and we can see what’s happening in real time.

[00:25:30] Um, so that should get us to about 75, 80% this position, uh, based on how many people use that, sir. Um, and then that’s gonna allow us, you can further optimize in general media buying, buying from league partners, et cetera.

[00:25:43] Jason: It’s so fascinating when you’re talking about everything, it would look like a hundred percent sale rate because they would just pick a, you know, close the sale mate.

[00:25:51] Um, what’s interesting. And I’ve always noticed is the number one disposition. When I pull reports, when a team is not, uh, they don’t fully understand the point of dispositions is it’s always the first one in the. Whatever’s the first one in the dropdown list of dispositions. That’s the one that will be the majority.

[00:26:08] And I’ve met. Phone call dispositions or phone call times and results with CRM dispositions. And it’s like, you didn’t leave a message. You talked to them 45 minutes, like, no. Yeah, but they’re just doing that. And, uh, I’m not surprised if you try to incentivize it. You’re not, you’re incentivizing, you know, something that’s, you’re not gonna get that result.

[00:26:28] I think the biggest thing for anyone listening to this, and this is where people just, they don’t understand the independent agents you’re working with, obviously. Right. Let’s say 40% of them get it. Um, but the thing that salespeople usually mess, and this is where leaders it’s really important to make them, make sure they understand is that if a company is buying leads, paying for performance matters.

[00:26:48] Then, if you want, as the sales person, more of the good leads, right? The ones that are, are better to, uh, you know, better spend better quality, that dispositions is most, all that matters, right? Like the quality of the decision will drive the quality of the lead buying and the performance marketing. And I think most salespeople just disconnect.

[00:27:07] They think, oh, this is dumb admin work. And I don’t like having to put a disposition, but that feedback is so important because. Buying it. And I, and I know that, I know that I know as a lead buyer, I have cut off campaigns. I did this early on because I didn’t know better. I’ve cut off campaigns that were probably successful, but I use disposition reports and listened to the wrong.

[00:27:28] And then Cuban inaccurate had potential.

[00:27:30] Koby: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, as a leader of a leading organization or a call center, large agency, like we said, at the beginning, when we started this, that you can’t have fear to test. So that’s what I’ve learned in my time in this industry. And if you’re testing and like throwing budgets at all these different lead sources, you have to have this position and you have to have an accurate disposition otherwise.

[00:27:52] You’re just going to be testing forever and have no idea if you’re getting the best value out of your media.

[00:27:59] Jason: And or buying, you know, going all in on a lead source. That’s actually not good, but the dispositions are misleading. I think that’s great. So in looking at it, right, like where you’ve come, what you see in the industry, you have this fascinating view of, you know, 14,000 independent agents agents in general, people in agencies, you know, you’re in the league.

[00:28:23] Performance marketing space. You’re dealing with buyers, call centers, things like that. What do you like? What’s the best advice you have for owners and leaders of let’s say call centers and sales team.

[00:28:37] Koby: It’s a loaded question. I would say don’t be afraid to innovate. And I think when you’re innovating and trying new things, don’t be afraid to test new stuff.

[00:28:49] I mean, those kind of go hand in hand. Um, everything we’ve said here, as far as collecting disposition and data, like data has to drive every single decision you make. That’s what we live and breathe on in here is data. What, what works, what doesn’t, and it has to be accurate. So I would say don’t be afraid to touch.

[00:29:06] If you land on a couple, you know, sources that you’re buying from or internal media buying, if it works, that’s great. You may have a great ROI from it and you you’re scaling it, but don’t be afraid to pull some budget out of that to test the new stuff and constantly testing new stuff, because you may find another golden nugget that performs better.

[00:29:26] Yeah. That would be my advice. I love it.

[00:29:29] Jason: And then one other question I have, so again, you have this fascinating view where not only are you looking at 14,000 agents over the, over the lifespan of your business and where you’ve gone to, but there’s also the fact that you’re getting some. Snapshot of buyers, buyers, behaviors, right?

[00:29:48] Like those perspective people, those humans that are filling out a lead form or raising their hand and saying they want help with something. You’re getting to see that. Is there anything that stands out as a pattern or the way that buyers are different, whether it’s pandemic related or not now versus three years ago, two years ago, like, how is the consumer changing and or what have salespeople?

[00:30:13] What should they keep in mind? About this consumer, any consumer?

[00:30:17] Koby: Yeah. So I mean, one on pandemic, I definitely saw a change. I don’t know if that change was because salespeople changed and it kind of changed the buying journey for a consumer. Like I think it consumer. Now 40 years ago before I was even born.

[00:30:32] I mean, I think they’re raising their hand that they want a product, whether it’s a hamburger at McDonald’s or if it’s a life insurance policy and they’re searching online for it. Um, I think consumers are just interested in a product and they want info. I think one thing that I’ve seen change and I see agents that they take so many different approaches to say.

[00:30:52] Some are really aggressive, but some I’ve seen that they treat consumers like humans. Like they’re people, these people have lives and like they have feelings and like they’re interested in a product and I’ve seen agents that when they get on the phone with a consumer, they know they’re interested in a product, but they also know they’re a human and they treat them like a human and they have a, a conversation just, uh, a very natural, organic conversation asking them how they’re doing.

[00:31:21] You know, what do they like? And just getting to know them. I think they have had more success. And I think that’s something in our training with our agents that we’ll push towards, um, because consumers are humans. I mean, and I think a lot of times in sales processes, they get consumers. Aren’t really thought of humans.

[00:31:37] They’re thought of commission and like, it’s just not the right way to go about it. And I think when companies do go about it that way, whether it’s a call center, uh, or these independent agents, like it’s just not successful in the law.

[00:31:50] Jason: I think that’s great. And I remember not sure if you were in the room during that time, but when we were in Orlando for the industry impact event, and it was Marty Collins from Quinn street, he specifically made a point of that.

[00:32:02] It’s like, this is not a lead that you’re buying, right. This is a person. Who wants help or is interested in help or you’re reaching out to, hopefully they have, could you have consent, but like, that’s not a lead, right? That’s not a sale, it’s a person. And to remember that, and you’re absolutely right. I mean, I think even not just the people who push too hard and they’re just only commissioned sometimes what happens is people just get desensitized.

[00:32:27] You know, they’re dealing with 5, 10, 500 calls a day and you just forget, like that is a person who. Life happening to them and, uh, exactly what I love your advice about. Remember that and have a conversation

[00:32:43] Koby: with them. Yeah. And I think that’s, I mean, industry-wide across any sales across any vertical. I think that’s why there’s so many.

[00:32:51] That’s why the government is so strict on and aggressive on consumer protection, laws and regulation is because of sales processes and companies and agents out there that, that are aggressive and it is offensive to a consumer because they’re a person and it should be. And so, I mean, I think that’s one of the big drivers of why regulation is so such a hot topic right now and why the government is cracking down so hard on, on lead companies and marketing companies.

[00:33:19] Jason: So speaking of that, like the regulation and compliance, where do you see regulations affecting like the compliance stuff and all the things that are happening right now, as we record this late July, like where do you see that affecting your business? Either making it challenging and, or making it so that like services like yours and the lead generators are doing it right?

[00:33:43] Like so valuable to keep people like salespeople, organizations

[00:33:48] Koby: safe. Yeah. So I think it’s in the long run, it’s going to be very variable for lead vendors in our space that are doing the right thing and taking matters into their own, own hands in terms of protecting consumers. We’re going to be good.

[00:34:04] Like all the companies that are doing the right thing and really treating consumers as their customer. And they’re not really getting revenue and they’re getting revenue from, you know, the call center or the company you’re selling leads to, if you think of the consumer as your true customer, because none of us would be in business.

[00:34:19] If there weren’t consumers that filled out forms or called into the phone. I think they’re going to be okay because regulation is going to force the bad guys to either change and do what’s right. Or it’s going to wash them out completely business. So I think the gods that are doing it right, it’s going to be beneficial right now.

[00:34:35] It’s the world’s crazy. And there’s new law, like TSP changes every month. So it is a challenge now like navigating that and making sure you’re compliant and every aspect of your business, it is a challenge. But I think in the long run, the good guys are going to win and that I’m kind of excited. Yeah,

[00:34:53] Jason: it is interesting when you’re on your side of the equation and focused on, you know, consent and compliance and all these things.

[00:35:02] Yeah, that you do. And I’ve seen this with organizations where it’s like, it’s actually good. It’s like more stuff that comes out. The more it takes care of the people who give everyone the bad reputation or hurt a whole industry or make it challenging. Right. Like, look at the robocalls that were happening and.

[00:35:19] Things in place and shut down or whatever. And it’s like, good, because those ones are the ones that are ruining it. There was a time when people liked getting phone calls and then it’s like, what happened? And then it’s like, wait, any calls, probably some kind of scam or they’re trying to sell me something.

[00:35:37] And so I agree. Yeah. So then what do you see next for your, I know you guys are doing calls, but just the industry as a whole, or, you know, anything else that you see coming just in the whole industry over the, let’s say the rest of this year into next year and crystal ball,

[00:35:59] Koby: crystal ball. Let me pull it out of my bag.

[00:36:03] Since I’ve been in this industry, um, got into it three years ago or so just in my time. And we were a new company, the industry I’ve seen a lot of new lead vendors, just, I mean, service providers, like I’ve seen so many new companies come into the space. Which is really exciting. And I mean, those companies, I think over the next year are going to start to have an impact in the industry.

[00:36:28] Um, whether it’s AI, software companies, new lead vendors with new funnels to generate leads. I think there’s over the next five years. This is my big crystal ball. I think this industry is set to. Kind of have a technology takeover. It’s a pretty old school industry. From what I’ve seen before I got into this industry, I was in the Bitcoin blockchain space for like four years.

[00:36:51] So every company in that space was a startup, like building some type of software, like very futuristic. And when I got into lead gen and going to these conferences, it felt very old school. It’s kind of a, what do you know, what’s in your network to determine how to determine your success, but there’s coming with tech really changing and shaking up the industry.

[00:37:14] But I think we’re going to see a lot of that in the next five years.

[00:37:19] Jason: I think that’s great. Well, so for people listening, they want to find out more. I know that a, the main website for you guys is lead Rilla L E a D R I L L E, like gorilla, but lead rilla.com. Uh, I know they can also find you Koby Hastings on LinkedIn.

[00:37:35] You’re active there. Any other content, anything you guys are working on, any other places to find what you’re working on or to reach out to you?

[00:37:43] Koby: Yeah, that’s us lead relay.com. Our support channel is [email protected]. So it’s pretty easy to remember. If you hit up support, you can get in contact with any of us here.

[00:37:54] They’ll connect you with whoever you need to talk to, even if it’s me. So reach out, we’ll talk.

[00:38:00] Jason: I love it. Well, Koby, I appreciate you being on the show. I appreciate what you’re doing. Again, scaling the unscalable, which is not easy, but, uh, it’s been fun getting to know you and watch what you’re doing even in the past, let’s say four months.

[00:38:12] So thanks for coming on here. Helping call center owners and doing what you’re doing.

[00:38:17] Koby: Yeah, thanks, Jason. This has been fun. Thanks for having me on, did you get some inspirations of ways to help your call center sales team win bigger, stronger, and faster. Hope you are fired up to scale your sales operations.

[00:38:32] If you got value from this podcast, please go in and leave a rating and review also make sure to forward this episode to anyone else, you know, in the call center. We appreciate your support in growing the scalable call center sales podcast, family. And if you have any comments, ideas, or feedback, contact us at cutterconsultinggroup.com. .